Another answer to Fermi's paradox

Fermi's Paradox was first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this:

The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

The issue is that the galaxy is simply huge beyond description. One answer to the paradox is that interstellar distances are so vast that such travel is simply impossible no matter the technology involved. Warp drive and the like are simply nothing but science fiction inventions and that's all they ever will be.

Various other answers have been posed in the 64 years since Fermi posed the question. One is that alien species with technical capability simply stayed home.

They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. 

(See "Fatal Fitness Cues.") Another answer is that interstellar travel is simply lethal to life. Or that the technological level required to achieve space flight means that its possessor also has the capability not to need to or even want to.

Then there is the calculation that even a 14 billion year-old universe simply has not been around long enough to result in planets teeming with intelligent life, and that therefore homo sapiens is the first species to have developed the capability of even rudimentary space flight. After all, someone has to be first and there is no scientific reason it wasn't us.

Or, as many scientists believe, the chances of complex life forming anywhere are so incredibly remote that we could be the only intelligent species in the entire universe, to say nothing of the Milky Way galaxy. Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr has pointed out that since life first appeared on Earth, there have been an estimated 50 billion species. And yet only one, us, has developed high intelligence. Mayr says that such intelligence does not obviously offer a species survival advantage and hence may be so rare that homo sapiens may be a "one off" in the universe.

All of this rests on what is called the "theory of mediocrity" because it holds that conditions on earth are simply average and that life-producing conditions are therefore abundant in the universe. So let's stipulate that this is true (although there are substantial numbers of researchers who say it is not true). That means we come to one simple question: How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?

And the answer is one heck of a lot. The minimum number is 10,000 setting off from the base planet, and 40,000 is even better. They don't all have to be on one ship.

When 10,000 people are housed in one starship, there's a potential for a giant catastrophe to wipe out almost everyone onboard. But when 10,000 people are spread out over five ships of 2000 apiece, the damage is limited.

To make interstellar travel a reality, scientists and engineers will have to overcome huge obstacles. They'll need to find ways to increase propulsion speed, prevent the negative health effects that arise from living in space, and devise self-sustaining systems that provide food, water, and air. At least the new calculations provide some sort of starting point.

"With 10,000," Smith says, "you can set off with good amount of human genetic diversity, survive even a bad disease sweep, and arrive in numbers, perhaps, and diversity sufficient to make a good go at Humanity 2.0." 

Here is the relationship to Fermi's Paradox. Those 10,000 people or aliens have to know where they are going before they set out. They have to know some details about the destination. Simply aiming for "second star to the right and straight on to morning" won't cut it. Unless they know at departure that their specific destination will host them almost immediately upon arrival, they can't go. The shortest trip will take hundreds of years at the minimum, possibly thousands. If they don't have a debarkation assurance at the other end to begin with, they might have to pass the star system by because there is nothing there to move on to. And that means basically starting all over again, doubling or more the trip time.

Admittedly, by the time dozens or more generations have spent entire lifetimes in space, they may just decide to bag a new planet and remain galactic wanderers. But would their ship be able to sustain life for thousands and thousands of years? Who knows? That question does not matter anyway because if they do not plan on settling a new planet, they won't set off to begin with. So how would they know there was a suitable planet there?

They can't unless a scouting expedition is sent first. Let's assume that it is unmanned. It will still take hundreds of years just to get to a likely target, and dozens of years at least for signals to get back.

All this adds up to a span of time so lengthy that such a project is not sustainable because it is just too hard. Even if there are dozens - heck hundreds - of technically competent species out there, they have simply stayed put within their own solar systems.

And so will we.

  

Update: Thanks to reader Harold for sending some other notes:

The scouting problem, that of finding potential planets for colonization, perhaps isn't quite so hard, and also allows for much faster overall travel of people, if interstellar conditions allow.  Or at least K. Eric Drexler came up with a conceptual solution, probably as part of what led him to nanotechnology, how to fabricate solar sails, which are ideally only a few atoms thick.

What you can do, from a long note in his book Engines of Creation to a section at the end of the chapter The World Beyond Earth", starting from a proposal by Robert Forward, is to build a solar powered laser and lens system, and use it to boost a, say, one ton lightsail based probe to, say, 90% the speed of light in "a fraction of a year".

Once the propulsion phase is done, some laser light is used to power nanotech assemblers that rebuild the probe into a "long, thin traveling-wave accelerator" (like "1,000 kilometers long, (there's room
enough, in space)"), which, as it flashes through the target system, fires a minuscule probe, a few microns in diameter, backwards, decelerating it.

As I like to put it, after the probe hits the target plant, and as its nanotech assembler cargo gets to work, the rest of the story follows any one of a number of alien contact and/or invasion stories ^_^.

And as he notes, one of the things it could eventually build is another laser system to provide braking for big lightsail propelled passenger systems that follow, if the planet is worth colonizing.

Update: Comment of the day at American Digest, where this post was linked: "What makes us think, believe, that there is intelligent life on Earth?"

Which is really a darn good question, when you think about it.

Update: If you want to spend a little more time on this topic, read, "What makes a planet suitable for supporting complex life?"

Fermi's paradox busted

Fermi's famous question about alien life off earth was, "Where is everybody?" And a former NASA scientist has the answer: they looked at the time it would take to get from one star system to another in the galaxy, even at Star Trek's transwarp speeds of up to 8,323 times the speed of light - and they said fuggedaboudit. We won't live that long.

People simply have no comprehension of how incredibly enormous the universe is.

Fatal fitness cues

I've written some about why no one has resolved Fermi's Paradox, that if life in the universe is as common as biologists and planetary scientists assume it is, then, "Where is everybody?" as physicist Fermi put it a few decades ago.

Today Warren Ferrell writes about an altogether different topic but one that seems oddly related. He says,

After Newtown, Conn., parents cried out, "What's making our children kill?" But it is not our children who are killing. It is our sons. All but one of the 62 mass killings in the past 30 years was committed by boys or men. 

Here's the un-obvious tie-in to Fermi's Paradox:

And just while their bodies are telling them that girls are the most important things in the world, these boys are locked into failure. Boys with a "failure to launch" are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete. They "end" this fear of rejection by typing "free video porn" into Google and working through the quarter-billion options. Online "success" increases the pain of real world failure.

So, too, with these boys' relationships with video games. While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation. He'll win at Madden football, but participate in no sport.

Fermi said that once a species develops the capability to travel through space, even the rudimentary ability we earthlings now have, it can reach every habitable point in the galaxy in only five million years. Since the galaxy is billions of years old, and if intelligent life is as common as ETI advocates claim, we space faring species should be tripping over each other. But we're not. Why?

One possibility that I recently posted is that interstellar space flight is just plain lethal to life. No living entity can survive the attempt. A more thought-provoking explanation is that once a species develops the technology for space flight, it has also developed the technology for all manner of other things, including entertainment.

And that means - since we assume evolutionary processes are much the same everywhere else as here - that those species become addicted to virtual experiences more than real ones.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

So species that could explore space don't for no reason other than it simply isn't fun enough.

Is there a link between technological (and therefore unreal) fitness cues and murderous calculation? I don't know, but it seems worth exploring. Perhaps Warren's observation that, "Online 'success' increases the pain of real world failure" is a clue. Why that pain invokes murder as well as suicide - and especially murder of small children - is a mystery.

Related: "He has a demon, and is mad"

Update, November 2013: The link between electronic immersion and real-world conduct has been established.

The answer to Fermi's paradox revealed

Physicist Enrico Fermi is well known for posing a famous paradox now named after him, the question that if life in the universe is (presumably) not uncommon, "Where is everybody?"

Fermi had calculated that once any species in the Milky Way achieved the capability to travel through space, it would be able to reach every extent of the galaxy in five million years. Since the galaxy is many billions of years old, he postulated, we should be practically surrounded by alien life or evidence thereof.

But we're not. So back to the question: "Where is everybody?"

The entire paradox depends on the assumption that earth and humanity are typical examples of planets and life anywhere else in the universe. This is usually referred to as the Theory of Mediocrity, that earth and its creatures are just average, universally. The problem is that Mediocrity is not a scientific conclusion but a presumption that is necessary for ETI searchers to do any work at all.

Many serious solutions have been offered as the paradox's resolution, but none really hold up.

But now I know!

Quite simply, the alien civilizations became so advanced that they fell victim to utterly incompetent self government. In other words, they fell into the deep, dark pit of socialism, and they fell into it one more time than they were able to get out.

And so the scene today on a typical alien planet:

Update: Five recent examples showing no matter where, no matter how, giving the Left political power is a comically stupid idea. The relevant part?

Typically, governments which fail catastrophically will invariably fold. The universal understanding that in order to maintain power a government will have to provide the necessary functions of a public sector — national security and law enforcement, infrastructure, basic health and education services, courts and the rule of law.

What we know in the 21st century is that the failure to provide adequately for those necessities, and particularly in concert with substituting other functions that are not necessities like wealth redistribution, regulating the intake of soda drinks, and micromanaging the use of real estate, is no longer sufficient to produce the removal of an incompetent government. What we know now is that rather than turn out a poisonous, overreaching gang of troglodytes in charge of a particular jurisdiction, the people contributing the tax base said troglodytes misappropriate from will simply decamp for better locales — and the rulers happily preside over the ruin that results, free of any particular threat of a middle-class revolt.

It’s this dynamic, playing out across the globe, that shows us civilizational decline in an advancing state.

Relatedly, technologically-advanced reality simulation has been proposed as an explanation for the lack of nearby aliens. First, this answer says that hyperdrives and FTL travel simply were never developed (and so may be impossible) and that the unimaginably vast distances of the galaxy make exploration simply too hard.

Then we have this: Virtual reality will completely transform children into zombies.

A girl tries virtual reality glasses at the Infosys's stand of the 2016 Hanover industrial trade fair in Hanover, Germany.

Warren Ferrell wrote,

While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation. He'll win at Madden football, but participate in no sport.

It makes sense that once a species develops the technology for space flight, it has also developed the technology for all manner of other things, including entertainment.

And that means - since we assume evolutionary processes are much the same everywhere else as here - that those species become addicted to virtual experiences more than real ones.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:

Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution. [Link]

So species that could explore space don't for no reason other than it simply isn't fun enough. More here.

Roswell UFO: The truth would end religion!

Yes, that's actually the claim of Jan Harzan, chief executive of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), who told Forbes.com that the US government won't release the truth about Rozwell because,

He said: "One possible reason is because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that Earth’s population is not ready for such a revelation.

"Other thoughts are that the knowledge would create widespread panic, cripple the stock market and end religion as we know it.

"Another possible reason is that the technology these beings have is so far advanced - whether it be faster-than-light travel, time travel or other far-advanced technology - that it poses a national security threat to America, especially if these capabilities were to fall into enemy hands."

Cripple the stock market? Doubtlessly. End religion? Not a chance. Human beings are inherently religious. No doubt there would be a lot of religious reworking and some would pass, but new ones would rise.

But what of Christianity? The Church first faced the question of life on other worlds oh, more than 800 years ago.

There was a push from the University of Paris in the late 13th century to have the Church make it dogma that there are no worlds other than our own and that life cannot exist elsewhere. This push was condemned by Paris' Bishop Etienne Tempier and was condemned by France’s Council of Bishops in 1277. It never made it to the Vatican.

The Church has never held that God has not or could not bring forth life anywhere that God chooses, including other planets.

Here are some Some prominent Christians who embraced idea of life on other worlds:

• Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa (15th century)
• Johannes Kepler (16th century) 
• American Puritan Cotton Mather (17th century)
• Yale president/minister Timothy Dwight (18th century)

I have posted a lot about the possibility of life on other worlds but I am mostly pessimistic about the odds. As someone once said, exobiology is the only academic field without an actual subject content.

As far as I recall, I have posted about Roswell only once, "Git yer tinfoil hat on, folks," June 2013, relating what the late Army Lt. Col. Phillip Corso wrote in his book, The Day After Roswell. 

Corso served as a White House member of the National Security Council in the 1950s and as deputy of the US Army's Foreign Technology Office in the Pentagon from 1960-1963. He claims in the book that his personal office in the Pentagon held the cabinet in which was stored the Army's files of what really happened at Roswell and some actual artifacts from the UFO that crashed there. Exploiting alien technology for mass production for military and later civilian use was his main job there.

I am not affirming or debunking Corso's claims, but his book is fascinating - for me, the parts that explained the military-political tussles and sub-cultures in Washington, D.C. was far more engrossing than the Roswell stuff. 

More:

Christian faith and life on other worlds

Odds of finding life elsewhere getting smaller by the day

What are the odds of life? Beyond mere astronomical

Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place

Hello, universe, anyone home? Hello?

The answer to Fermi's paradox revealed - what caused the downfall of advanced alien civilizations? Socialism.

Skynet will be living inside your refrigerator

And your Amazon Echo or Google Home:

Security Experts Warn Congress That the Internet of Things Could Kill People

Answer to Fermi's paradox? "They got killed by their Roombas."

Hello, universe, anyone home? Hello?

The Fermi Paradox raises its head again, this time over at Outside the Beltway. Doug Mataconis posts, "Hey, Is Anyone Out There?" in which he tries to answer the paradox. The paradox, first formulated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, is this:

The universe is many billions of years old.
Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years.
But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Doug does a good job in laying out the premises of the paradox and offers some perspectives I haven't seen before, including that while the galaxy may be teeming with intelligent species, they have all become addicted to entertainment and simply are uninterested in space travel, a notion floated by Geoffrey Miller.

Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. ...

Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves.

Behaviorally, this makes a lot of sense, but it falls into the same trap that pretty much all discussions about the commonality of intelligent life off earth do: the assumption that earth and humanity are typical examples of planets and life anywhere else in the universe. This is usually referred to as the Theory of Mediocrity, that earth and its creatures are just average, universally. Doug himself endorses this notion in a comment to his post: "it does seem hard to believe that we are the only intelligent form of life to ever evolve in our own universe." The problem is that Mediocrity is not a scientific conclusion but a presumption that is necessary for ETI searchers to do any work at all.

Last year I put together a slide presentation for the topic to discuss Fermi's Paradox at my church. You will probably be surprised at the conclusion. Here tis:



Fullscreen here.

Related:

Stephen Hawking, science fiction writer

This is pretty impressive, too.

Why We Matter (link was dead, fixed now.)

Let there be

Maybe aliens are too stupid for space travel

A long Ramble on Time & Memory | The Z Blog

There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly 10 million, while all of Africa was 90 million. Britain now has 65 million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But, the mass culture has something to with it too. There’s really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense  that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there’s the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantalization of man. One day people will loom at the their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

And so Fermi's Paradox - Where are all the aliens? - is solved, first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this:

The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Well, Once they invented their equivalent of smartphones and the internet, in only three generations they were too stupid to build interstellar spacecraft. And no longer interested in it, anyway.

Various other answers have been posed in the 66 years since Fermi posed the question. One basically said that alien species that might have developed the technical capability simply got addicted to manufactured, virtual-reality pleasures.

They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. 

See here.

Update: "Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist"

Where is everybody? They're dead.

Fermi's Paradox was first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this: The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in our galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Many answers have been proposed by serious, highly-credentialed scientists - more than 50 different answers, as I recall. I have written a lot about the paradox.

Now, Astronomy.com offers this: The aliens are silent because they are extinct:

Latest theory: This will never hear anything.

Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, said astrobiologists from the Australian National University (ANU).

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra from ANU.

“Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”

“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus, and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said Charley Lineweaver from ANU.

“Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he said.

Then there is recent study, published in the prestigious journal Science, that life is simply impossible in probably 90 percent of galaxies in the universe because of intense gamma radiation. And ordinary solar and cosmic radiation would have stopped life here on Earth without the Earth's magnetic fields shielding the planet, but planetary magnetic fields apparently are very uncommon; they have not been detected on any other planet anywhere. (See here.)

Update: The Atlantic writes of World War 2 bomber crews who learned not to up-armor planes where they had been struck by flak or enemy fire. After all, those hits were survivable.

Don’t protect the planes where they were taking the most damage, Wald said. Armor the planes where there were no bullet holes at all.

“You put armor where there are no holes, because the planes that got shot there didn’t return to the home base,” says Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “They crashed.”

The article goes on to explain "observer selection effect," where we are able to observe something only because we survived the causes. We look at our own world and see life in enormous variety, flourishing everywhere, even in rocks and immense pressures of the deep sea and hot springs of near-boiling temperatures.

And we easily conclude, "Life is everywhere on our planet, so it must be everywhere out there." This powers the SETI programs, in fact, and is so pervasive it even has a name: the Principle of Mediocrity, which means simply that earth and its biosphere are unexceptional. The earth and its life are merely average in the universe - average, which is what "mediocre" means. But it is just as likely - probably more so - that our conclusions spring the the observer selection effect: we conclude that what we see is normal.

What see are 100-mile-wide "bullet" holes on our planet, and hey, we're still here. All is well and this is cosmically normal. But there's a problem.

After all, there are 100-mile impact craters on our planet’s surface from the past billion years, but no 600-mile craters. But of course, there couldn’t be scars this big. On worlds where such craters exist, there is no one around afterward to ponder them. In a strange way, truly gigantic craters don’t appear on the planet’s surface because we’re here to look for them. Just as the wounds of the returning planes could reflect only the merely survivable, so too for our entire planet’s history. It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence. ...

 “Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.”

If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood. 

"Stark silence." Where is everybody? They're dead.

Perhaps we’re truly extreme oddballs, held aloft by a near-impossible history—one free from deadly migrating gas giants and solar-system chaos, but also filled with freakishly favorable accidents, like a cataclysmic impact early in our history that created a strange, gigantic moon that stabilized our orbit and allowed complex life to flourish. As the solar system continued to shake out, we somehow ended up with just the right amount of water to lubricate plate tectonics, keeping the climate habitable over hundreds of millions of years and preventing a Venus-style planetary resurfacing catastrophe, but not so much water that we wound up on a lifeless water world.

So far, empirical evidence supports the conclusion that we are alone.

Is anybody out there? Doesn't seem so.

More Evidence That Aliens Aren’t Trying to Communicate With Us

So either advanced alien civilizations don’t behave in this way (e.g. they hide their presence or engage in other activities), or they don’t exist. It’s also possible that technological civilizations are exceptionally rare in the galaxy (both in time and space), greatly limiting the ability of the researchers to detect a signal. As the authors of the new study admit, “We may begin to wonder if arguments along the lines of the so-called Fermi paradox have some merit.” Indeed, the eerie silence of space is getting louder with each new attempt to detect alien intelligence.

Fermi's Paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who in the 1950's mathematically showed that once a species achieves space flight, it should cover the whole galaxy in only five million years. Since the galaxy is many billions of years old, Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" Various answers have been proposed but none generally accepted.

But this, seriously, is one of them, just not expressed so cartoonishly.

Are we first in the universe?

The SETI project (Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence) is coming up empty and starting, perhaps, to ponder a shocking possibility - that homo sapiens is one of the first, maybe even the only, spacefaring life form to have developed in the galaxy.

Science writer Mark Thompson explains that even a 14-billion-year-old universe may not be old enough to result in planets teeming with life, especially intelligent life.

It seems that the evolution of stars precluded the formation of rocky planets much before the appearance of Population I stars. If that is the case, and adding a generous margin for error, it looks like the first planets like Earth would have formed no earlier than 8 billion years ago. 

If that is true, then it may well be that we are not necessarily the first life, but perhaps amongst the first intelligent life (as we know it) to evolve.

Furthermore, there is no teleology in evolution theory. No outcome is inevitable, there is no such thing as  "higher" life forms. There is only survival, or not. Hence, technological, inventive beings are not a rational development of evolution at all. There is no "rational" development of life in the first place.

And as Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr has pointed out, since life first appeared on Earth, there have been an estimated 50 billion species. And yet only one, us, has developed high intelligence. Mayr says that such intelligence does not obviously offer a species survival advantage and hence may be so rare that homo sapiens may be a "one off" in the universe.

In 2011 I put together a slide presentation for the topic to discuss Fermi's Paradox at my church. You will probably be surprised at the conclusion. Here tis:

 

Answer to Fermi's Paradox?

Radiation From Deep-Space Could Accelerate Alzheimer’s - Business Insider:

Physicist Enrico Fermi postulated that once a civilization attained even rudimentary space flight, it should be able to reach any point in the galaxy in only five million years. The Milky Way, however, is billions of years old. "So," asked Fermi, "where is everybody?"

One answer I posted about a year ago is that all the alien races we assume are out there are too busy overeating fast food and watching electronic porn to journey millions of light years through space for no good reason.

Now a more technical reason may be in the offing. Turns out that interstellar space flight will just plain kill you:



Alzheimers just going to Mars? That surely means death going to an enormously-farther star.